A deeper look into Patricia Wood

Today, we will take a deeper look into Patricia Wood, and look for different clues about her life that possibily could give us some new information in the story.  I've touched this in the last post but I believe that the information from that post is relevant to what I am discussing now and I have inserted the relevant exerpt from that post below.   The first quote from my previous blog post is trying to understand why Patricia Wood decided to use the word "gyp" and the second quote is just a fun fact about the setting I have discovered. 

"The book was published around 2008, which makes the book quite recent.  Personally, I don't hear the word "gyp" as often as some of it's alternatives such as "rip-off".  If we take a look at the Author's (Patricia Wood) personal history we see that she recalls a place by the name of "Casey's Drive-in on Aurora Avenue". She also recalls that "For a dollar, you could buy a deluxe hamburger, fries, and a milkshake -- and get change back."  The word gyp, might have come from a time in the past.  It has to be recent enough that the price of food as significantly changed, but distant enough from the present that "gyp" is still a word that is used, even if it is not used often.  I am not entirely sure, but I believe that she simply brought that word back into her memory when she was writing this passage."-Hank Wu, Tuesday, January 18, 2010

"(Side Note: Everett, Washington is the city that Patricia Wood's child lives in, and also happens to be where the book takes place.)"-Hank Wu, Tuesday, January 18, 2010


Now let's get some quick background information on her.  She was one of four sets of twins in her neighborhood.  When she was two years old, she fell right into a fire and she was quickly soaked in saltwater.  She says that this is what gave her love of the sea.  Now, she lives in a 48-foot sailboat called Orion which is located in Hawaii  and she has one son who (as I've said before) lives in Everett, Washingon which is the location of the book "Lottery".   She first discovered writing when she was 8 years old and wrote a book titled "Thickamore The Backnus".  Along with all of this she says that she has done research on sharks, competed in horse shows, and served in the army.

What might caused Patricia Wood to write a story about a person who was mentally unfit who had won the Lottery?  I believe that we can break that basic summary of the book down into two parts: fortune and disabilities.

At first, I could not find a way that these two things were related, and how Patricia Wood's life instigated this.  Then, I found something that made everything click.  Patrica Wood actually was a teacher for special education.  That experience must have influenced Perry's character in many ways.  In the University of Hawaii, Patricia Wood is an actual candidate for the specific area of education and people with disabilities.  It also seems, that she has written quite a lot about educating people with disabilities and even home-schooling the disabled.  Now, Perry (the main character of "Lottery") was not homeschooled, but he did learn many different academic things at home from his Parental figure at home, such as memorizing different words from the dictionary.    Most importantly, she advocates and supports special needs students.  I believe that the Lottery was an inspiration from her work as a special education teacher and as a student on special education to spread the word about people with mental disablities.  She herself has said, "We know how far people can go, yet not enough gets out to the real world. Normal people do not pick up a book to read about special needs adults.”  She wanted to spread word about people with disabilities and what a person with disabilities was like along with giving the person with disabilities a happy accident.  I believe that she loved disabled people so much, that she wanted to help all of them any way she could, even if she made the disabled person up.

Suddenly, everything is starting to make sense.